tl;dr When writing prose, what are the 'killer features' of Scribble that make people choose it over any other tool? (Specifically in the context of prose -- Scribble is unbeatable when writing Racket documentation.)
Learning scribble seems like a big investment, and when writing prose I'm not convinced that it has more batteries-included expressive power than HTML. For one thing, according to the docs you need to physically replace the scribble.css file to change the appearance of the HTML output and I haven't seen an option to inline it. For point of example, I would describe the 'killer features' of HTML+CSS to be: separation of presentation and semantics; easily perform complete transformations on appearance just by changing the CSS; store presentation commands externally or internally in a discrete segment; rich ecosystem for modification, publication, translation to other formats; and universal availability of the viewer. Long form: I write about 3-6,000 words per week for a shared-world story I co-author. I'm also toying with the idea of going back and writing a sequel to one of my earlier novels. The question then becomes: What should I write them in? Scribble is the obvious and unbeatable choice for technical writing about Racket, since you can evaluate code inline and the results are included for you. For prose, I'm less clear. I typically write raw HTML and put a stylesheet on it to get whatever effect I want. It lets me cleanly separate content from presentation so that I can straightforwardly transform things for various media and display sizes, although when I'm publishing to a XenForo forum I need to use a simple script to translate HTML to BBCode. Also on the down side, I have to go back and manually generate a separate version containing the commentary for my Patreon readers. It would be nice to have a tool that: A) Could conditionally include sections depending on environment variables or command-line switches B) Could seamlessly generate PDF, MOBI, EPUB, and clean and valid HTML that either inlines the CSS or links to a specified CSS file as specified at publication time. (The inline option is important for when publishing on Amazon.) C) Handles UTF-8 correctly I see that other people have used Scribble for non-technical purposes, so I'm curious to find out more. Is Scribble the right tool for the job and why? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Racket Users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to racket-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/racket-users/CAE8gKoejrP58nf08%2BNTys-F5LmHjYEN%2BL--_pKz-zcMRk1UUpA%40mail.gmail.com.
